1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the production of rolled conical hollow wafers from individual baked flat wafer blanks made from sugar-containing dough.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Rolled hollow wafers are known as wafer cones, sweet wafer cones and wafer rolls. Each of these items is formed by rolling a baked wafer sheet or flat wafer blank to a conical or cylindrical shape. Such wafer products belong to the wafer products which are made by machines in the food processing industry and which are offered for sale in a filled or unfilled state and are generally known as luxury foods. In addition to the above-mentioned wafer cones, sugar cones and wafer rolls, these products of the wafer-making industry include other wafer products, such as cast wafer cones, wafer cups, wafer plates, flat wafer discs, low hollow wafers, hollow rods, ice cornets, filled wafers, wafers for ice cream, small filled wafer rods, wafer slices and the like.
Such wafer products are baked products, which are made from wafer dough and have a crisp, brittle, fragile consistency and are baked to be as dry as possible so that they have a very low moisture content. Sweet wafer products may be made from a wafer dough which has a relatively high sugar content. The wafer products made from such wafer doughs can be shaped when they are still warm owing to the baking heat. That property is utilized in the production of hollow rods, sweet cornets, sweet wafer rolls and the like. In that case individual wafer sheets or a continuous wafer web is baked and are or is given the final shape when the sheets are or the web is still soft after the baking operation.
Other wafer products are baked in their final shape. This is the case, e.g., with cast wafer cones, wafer cups, wafer discs, low hollow wafers and the like.
In dependence on the kind of the wafer product, the latter may be provided with any of several coatings made, e.g., of sugar or chocolate, or may contain different filling materials, such as ice cream, various creams, chocolate compositions and the like.
Different from the wafer products are waffles, which are baked in waffle irons, usually by housewives, and which constitute a baked product that is soft and has a consistency like a roll or pancake. Such waffles made by housewives differ greatly in consistency from the wafer products of the wafer industry which have been described hereinbefore.
In the production of rolled hollow wafers it is known that flat wafer blanks which have been baked from a wafer dough having a high sugar content and emerge from an automatic wafer baking machine can be given their final shape in a winding mold in which each wafer blank is rolled around a winding core and that a wafer cone can be formed in this manner, for instance. In that operation each flat wafer blank which emerges from the wafer baking oven and which is produced with a pattern in most cases is either taken directly from the wafer baking plates, introduced into the winding mold and rolled in the latter by a rotation of the winding core, or is taken from the wafer baking plates by a separate taking apparatus and supplied to the winding mold to be rolled therein. After the rolling operation the winding core is preferably arrested or rotated only at a low speed and after a short cooling time, in which the rolled hollow wafer assumes a firmer consistency, that hollow wafer is removed from the winding mold preferably together with the winding core.
The shape of the hollow wafers thus made will depend on the rolling of the flat wafer blank and on the uniformity of the rolling of consecutive wafer blanks. For this reason such hollow wafers vary in shape, particularly in length, diameter and the like. That variation is due to the fact that when the wafer blank is taken from the baking plate and is introduced into the winding mold even slight differences in the shape and size of different wafer blanks will result in a slight twisting of the wafer blank as it is drawn into the wafer mold so that different rolled wafers may differ in height and may have a stepped top edge. Such variations will be inevitable even if the rolling operation is very exactly controlled and in the production of wafer cones, including sweet wafer cones, from suitably shaped wafer blanks these variations have the result that the wafer cones have openings differing in size and have different heights so that their dimensions which are significant for the nesting of the wafer cones and the capacities of the wafer cones for ice cream or the like differ too. These different shapes of the wafer cones give rise to serious problems in the further processing of the wafer cones by machine, e.g., in the finishing or filling of such wafer cones or similar operations.
To permit a further processing of the wafer cones in machines at a high rate, the wafer cones are nested to form long stacks. The nested size of each cone, i.e., the extent to which the wafer cone protrudes from a receiving wafer cone, should be within very close tolerances. But the above-mentioned variations of the shape of the wafer cones involve also large variations of their nested size so that the singling of the wafer cones gives rise to difficulties regarding the pulling and retaining elements and may cause two wafer cones to be pulled off at the same time or a wafer cone to be destroyed as it is pulled off.
In addition to rolled wafer cones, cast wafer cones have been known for a long time. Cast wafer cones are cast in a casting mold which has the dimensions and the surface structure which are desired for the wafer cone. Liquid wafer dough is poured into said casting mold and is baked therein to form the wafer cone, which is then removed. In the production of so-called straw cones the wafer dough used for that operation contains no sugar or has a very low sugar content up to 5% so that damage to the cone as it is removed from the casting mold will be avoided as far as possible. Cast wafer cones containing up to 30% sugar have also been made but special precautions must be taken in their production and include, e.g., the use of certain additives in the dough, a special treatment of the casting molds, etc., in order to ensure that the wafer cones being baked will not firmly stick to the casting molds and the wafer cones will not be damaged as they are removed. So-called sweet wafer cones made from a wafer dough having a high sugar content in excess of 35% are usually made as rolled sugar cones.
It has already been proposed that wafer dough having a high sugar content may be baked in a casting mold which is only roughly similar to the shape of the desired wafer cone and which has smooth inside surfaces so that the baked wafer cone is a blank having only roughly the desired shape. That blank is removed from the casting mold and placed into a reshaping mold, which has exactly the desired dimensions and the desired surface structure (pattern) and in which the blank is compressed to the shape desired for the finished wafer cone. In that operation the wall thickness of the blank is greatly reduced and the blank is given the final shape desired for the wafer cone. That known process of making a cast wafer cone cannot be carried out on an industrial scale in practice because the blank has a very loose structure and owing to the high sugar content of the wafer dough sticks firmly to the casting mold so that the blank cannot be removed from the casting mold without damage and the previously unsolved problems involved in the removal of the blanks from the mold do not permit the wafer cones to be made at a high rate.